American election watching in Myanmar: Considering social media and Buddhist-Muslim conflict.As Myanmar continues to face violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities a number of voices, from within the country and from outside, have raised concerns about the influence of social media. After riots in Mandalay during July 2014, for example, international and local media and government sources identified rumours circulating on Facebook as the cause.2 President Thein Sein has also raised concerns about ‘hate speech’ and other instigating messages shared online and in her first report the new UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Myanmar, Ms Yanghee Lee, noted that such messages are fuelling and triggering violence.3 But less than 5% of the population in Myanmar is estimated to have access to the Internet.4 How can access to social media be contributing to Buddhist-Muslim conflicts? To say that low Internet penetration rates proves the irrelevance of social media is too simple, however, especially because access to the Internet is expanding rapidly. As an empirical matter, it is likely too early to conclusively determine if and how social media access is influencing Buddhist-Muslim conflicts in Myanmar. But this does not mean the potential relationship is unworthy of consideration. Therefore, in order to generate insights that may be useful in both understanding the contemporary moment as well as anticipating the future, this chapter will draw from experiences with, and literature on, relationships between social media and political conflicts in another country context: the United States. Matt Schissler, in Nick Cheesman & Htoo Kyaw Win (ed.), Communal Violence in Myanmar, Myanmar Knowledge Society, Yangon, 2015 [In Burmese and English].

1. Matt Schissler
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American
election
watching
in
Myanmar:
Considering
social
media
and
Buddhist-­‐Muslim
conflict
Matt Schissler, in Nick Cheesman & Htoo Kyaw Win (ed.), Communal Violence in Myanmar,
Myanmar Knowledge Society, Yangon, 2015 [In Burmese and English].1
FINAL pre-publication draft
As Myanmar continues to face violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities a number of
voices, from within the country and from outside, have raised concerns about the influence of
social media. After riots in Mandalay during July 2014, for example, international and local
media and government sources identified rumours circulating on Facebook as the cause.2
President Thein Sein has also raised concerns about ‘hate speech’ and other instigating messages
shared online and in her first report the new UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in
Myanmar, Ms Yanghee Lee, noted that such messages are fuelling and triggering violence.3
But
less than 5% of the population in Myanmar is estimated to have access to the Internet.4
How can
access to social media be contributing to Buddhist-Muslim conflicts?
To say that low Internet penetration rates proves the irrelevance of social media is too
simple, however, especially because access to the Internet is expanding rapidly. As an empirical
matter, it is likely too early to conclusively determine if and how social media access is
influencing Buddhist-Muslim conflicts in Myanmar. But this does not mean the potential
relationship is unworthy of consideration. Therefore, in order to generate insights that may be
useful in both understanding the contemporary moment as well as anticipating the future, this
chapter will draw from experiences with, and literature on, relationships between social media
and political conflicts in another country context: the United States.
1
Portions of this article were circulated in the conference paper “Echo Chambers in Myanmar: Social Media and the
Ideological Justifications for Mass Violence,” prepared for the Australian National University Department of
Political & Social Change Research Colloquium, “Communal Conflict in Myanmar: Characteristics, Causes,
Consequences,” 17-18 Mar 2014, Yangon, Myanmar. The author is thankful for feedback received.
2
See for example, Gianluca Mezzofiore, “Wirathu’s ‘Buddhist Woman Raped’ Facebook Post Stokes Anti-Muslim
Violence in Mandalay,” International Business Times UK, 2 July 2014, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wirathus-
buddhist-woman-raped-facebook-post-stokes-anti-muslim-violence-mandalay-1455069 (accessed 2 July 2014);
Thomas Fuller and Wai Moe, “Buddhist-Muslim Mayhem Hits Myanmar’s No. 2 City,” The New York Times, July
3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/world/asia/buddhist-muslim-mayhem-hits-myanmars-no-2-city.html
(accessed 3 July 2014).
3
Yanghee Lee, Statement of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Yangon,
Myanmar, July 26, 2014), http://www.mizzima.com/mizzima-news/myanmar/item/11906-un-special-rapporteur-s-
statement/11906-un-special-rapporteur-s-statement (accessed 1 October 2014).
4
Estimates regarding Internet access vary. Regional marketing companies, for example, estimate that Internet
connectivity is just 1%, but public references by private sector and government officials in Myanmar note 5%. But
whatever the exact population with current access, it is clear that this percentage is a small one. See for example, We
Are Social, 2014 Asia-Pacific Digital Overview: We Are Social’s Snapshot of Key Digital Data & Statistics
(Singapore, January 16, 2014), http://www.slideshare.net/wearesocialsg/social-digital-mobile-in-apac (accessed 17
February 2014).

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It may seem strange to choose the US a comparator; it is, after all, an industrial
democracy that is extremely different from Myanmar in terms of history, culture, political
system and economic development. But this choice is deliberate, not least because it will help to
complicate common assumptions about current conflicts in Myanmar as resulting from
ignorance, poverty, age-old and primordial hatreds, or a state and society unable to manage new
freedoms. The American political context, then, is an instructive comparison precisely because it
is so different from Myanmar. In considering how the changing technological and media
environment may contribute to conflict in Myanmar, the US may generate insights about
potential dynamics that are both useful for identifying future research directions and for policy
makers and civil society actors seeking to promote peace and social harmony.
American election watching
I first began thinking about technology and political conflict in Myanmar during November
2012. It was early morning in Yangon, where I sat with a group of other Americans to watch
results as the polls closed across each time zone in the United States. Up at dawn, we had all
pitched in to rent a cheap hotel room with satellite television, and we did our best to replicate the
way we would watch an election back home: generic network coverage augmented by online
news outlets, political blogs – and social media, where friends across the country were using
Facebook and Twitter to do the same thing, posting updates, thoughts, and links.
In Myanmar, our Internet slowed to a crawl, as it often did at that time. We had one
satellite news channel and the only Internet page that would load: Facebook. Part of the modern
American election watching tradition culminates in television news channels announcing the
results, and we sat and watched as Barack Obama was proclaimed the winner in successive
states. On Facebook, my friends back home were increasingly celebratory. Of course they were;
I am from the relatively liberal west coast, as are many of my friends, and nothing on my
Facebook ‘newsfeed’ suggested that President Obama was anything but the superior choice.
Seated next to me was a friend from conservative parts of Pennsylvania – his newsfeed was a
mirror image of mine; that is, in complete reverse, heavily weighted towards the Republican
challenger, Mitt Romney.
Reading either of our separate newsfeeds provided a view into wildly divergent realities –
the difference only becoming fully intelligible when we sat our laptops side by side and read
them simultaneously. Our newsfeeds seemed to be completely sealed off from one another;
discourse was not crossing over. Perhaps this effect was heightened by our vantage point. We
were in Myanmar, after all. Facebook and satellite news were our only windows into America,
and looking through them we saw two different campaigns, two different expected outcomes.
Two different countries.
When we looked out over Yangon, we looked through windows in our communal hotel
room. But more than glass mediated our view of the elections. The elections we saw were the
ones described in the comments and articles linked to by our friends; we did not ‘see’ the
election so much as read about it, via content carefully curated by other people with political
viewpoints similar to our own. This is no surprise; Facebook users interact with and receive
information from ‘friends,’ and these self-selected ‘friends’ are often highly similar to the user.
Sociologists describe this as a tendency towards ‘homophily’ in social networks, which is

3. Matt Schissler
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another way to say ‘birds of a feather flock together.’5
As I watched the 2012 US presidential
election, in other words, my window opened into a world populated mostly by people like me.
The level to which my election watching experience felt mediated was certainly
heightened by our vantage point. We were Americans, in Myanmar and far from home;
Facebook and satellite news were the only windows into our country. But many others have
described similar experiences. Indeed, a recent book by Eli Pariser, who rose to prominence for
online campaigns such as MoveOn.org, opens with a nearly identical anecdote.6
Pariser attributes
this kind of experience to the ‘filter bubble,’ his term for the way that information accessed
online is filtered by search engines and social media interfaces, which seek to predict what users
are likely to find interesting, desirable – and credible. ‘Without sitting down next to a friend, it’s
hard to tell how the version of Google or Yahoo News that you’re seeing differs from anyone
else’s,’ says Pariser. ‘But because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important,
true, and real, it’s critically important.’7
Cass Sunstein of Harvard University, meanwhile, has for over a decade been raising
concerns about the negative impacts he believes new media are having on democracy, politics
and society in America. In 2001, Sunstein published Republic.com, in which he used the concept
of an ‘echo chamber’ to encapsulate the idea that people select information sources – and the
friends from whom they get information – to fit their existing beliefs. Democrats, for example,
are more likely to read news from liberal media outlets and Republics are more likely to access
outlets that are conservative; and as a result, the news and information they access is not the
same.8
For Sunstein, rather than enable a circulation of ideas that facilitates deliberation, this
echo chamber means that the Internet and social media are likely to drive extremism: as
individuals self-select information sources, their pre-existing beliefs and assumptions are
reinforced, strengthened and made more extreme because they consistently hear information that
aligns with – or does not contradict – these beliefs.9
At the time Republic.com was first being published, one of the most controversial
presidential elections in recent US history was being decided. The 2000 Presidential election was
too close to call; the views of how to proceed reflected the polarized views of the US two party
system, with the outcome ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. In an essay on these events,
Sunstein argued that the election controversy was not the result of simple partisanship, but
instead the product of the same media environment described in Republic.com. ‘The
phenomenon, sometimes called group polarization, involves the tendency of like-minded
individuals engaged in discussion with one another to fortify their pre-existing views – and
indeed to move toward more extreme points of view in the general direction in which they were
already tending,’ he wrote. ‘If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are
5
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,”
Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001): 415–44.
6
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think
(New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books/Penguin Press, 2012), 8.
7
Ibid., 16.
8
Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
9
Cass R. Sunstein, “Neither Hayek nor Habermas,” Public Choice 134, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2008): 87–95.

4. Matt Schissler
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talking primarily with Democrats… there is a potential for the development of different forms of
extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group.’10
Scholars from other fields have also raised concerns about the consequences when people
access their information from a limited set of authorities. This is based upon a theory of the way
that people determine what is ‘true’ in the world, not primarily from their own internal reasoning
process but by relying on others. This is called ‘epistemic dependence,’ which refers to a kind of
division of labour, the process by which a person, for example, accepts that smoking cigarettes
causes cancer without grasping the full details of medical science. It is how societies function;
not everyone has the opportunity or the time to train as a doctor. Instead, people learn to trust
those who do.11
The idea that people are epistemologically dependent is not alarming when applied to
medicine. But when people become exclusively reliant on one set of authorities, this can result in
a situation that Michael Baurmann calls ‘epistemic seclusion.’ Baurmann argues that ‘epistemic
seclusion’ explains why large groups of people sometimes adopt views that appear incredible to
another audience; they adopt such views because the authorities they trust tell them they are so.
While extreme, ‘irrational’ or fundamentalist viewpoints are often dismissed as the result of
psychosis, primitive ignorance or susceptibility to brainwashing, Baurmann would say that such
beliefs are a result that is not dissimilar from heeding a doctor’s warning.12
People in the United States get their information from a variety of sources of course, not
just social media. It would thus not be accurate to say that all Americans are epistemically
secluded. But Facebook and other social media have become dominant platforms, even more so
than when Sunstein was originally writing, for accessing and sharing news and information. A
survey released by the Pew Research centre in December 2013, for example, found that 73% of
adults in the US were using some form of social media, with 63% of adults checking Facebook at
least once a day.13
Facebook, meanwhile, is seeking to establish itself not just as a social network
but, as founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in March 2013, ‘the best personalized newspaper in
world.’14
Research released by Pew a few months later found that approximately half its users
10
Cass R. Sunstein, Echo Chambers: Bush V. Gore, Impeachment, and Beyond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 5.
11
John Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence,” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–49.
12
See Michael. Baurmann, “Rational Fundamentalism? An Explanatory Model of Fundamentalist Beliefs,”
Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 150–66. See also Russell Hardin, “The Crippled
Epistemology of Extremism,” in Political Extremism and Rationality, ed. Albert Breton et al. (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–22.
13
Aaron Smith and Maeve Duggan, “Social Media Update 2013,” Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life
Project, December 30, 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/ (17 February
2014).
14
Kevin Morris, “Facebook Is No Longer a Social Network,” The Daily Dot, March 7, 2013,
http://www.dailydot.com/business/facebook-no-longer-social-network-news-feed/ (17 February 2014).

5. Matt Schissler
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get news from Facebook, a number that represents 30% of the US population.15
It is no wonder
that Facebook was an important part of the way I experienced the 2012 election; it was likely
similarly important for many others back home in America.
Considering social media and Buddhist-Muslim violence
My experience viewing the 2012 elections threw into stark relief the degree to which my
understanding of American politics on that day was filtered by a lens of my Facebook friends’
own making. What are the implications for people in Myanmar if their understandings of
important events, topics, and threats are similarly filtered? Sunstein and Pariser argue that the
phenomena they have identified mean that social media is different from other media because
they are filtered in ways that ensures content matches the user’s existing views and the views of
their friends. The result is epistemic seclusion that can exacerbate conflicts and make divisions
within societies more severe.
If Sunstein and Pariser’s arguments were layered directly onto Myanmar, their analysis
would indicate that as social media use increases, conflicts such as between Buddhist and
Muslim communities will worsen. But such an analysis would be applicable only insofar as
social media becomes the dominant source of news and information. Will this be the case in
Myanmar? To what degree will people rely on social media to access information and ideas
about the world? People in Myanmar currently rely on a variety of sources for information,
though some may also already be ‘epistemically secluded.’ The most basic lesson from the
American context is that it will be important to pay careful attention to the ways that social
media come into popular use in Myanmar: is it encouraging people to receive new kinds of
information, from new sources that challenge them to consider their existing beliefs? Or are new
technologies and media repeating and reinforcing what they already assume to be true?
At the same time, it is important not to conclude that the future is written in code and
circuits. Such a conclusion would be profoundly disempowering, for it would be to say that upon
the arrival and widespread use of social media, divisions and conflict in society are inevitable,
unchangeable. Scholars from the field of history of technology have done ample work to show
that such deterministic analyses never capture the fullness of history; a host of other factors
beyond the technological will also influence the future for Myanmar. At the same time, however,
these historians have shown time and again that technologies do have material effects.16
Technologies are designed to accomplish particular purposes and whether and how they are
effective in achieving these ends, or other unforeseen ones, matters.17
This is the adage:
15
Amy Mitchell, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms,” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project,
November 14, 2013, http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-across-social-media-platforms/ (17 February
2014).
16
Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and
Agatha Chipley Hughes, 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001).
17
Gabrielle Hecht, “Technology, Politics, and National Identity in France,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in
Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen, 1st
Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 257.

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‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’, and it may reflect, strengthen, perform
and change existing power relationships.18
Myanmar is different from America in important ways. Unlike the US, it is experiencing
the beginning of an abrupt upheaval in technology and media, one which will mark clearly a
‘before’ and ‘after’ moment in which mobile phones and the Internet arrive to successive parts of
the country. Such changes were much older and less abrupt in the US. Other countries, however,
have undergone more analogously swift change. Over just a ten-year period in India, for
example, the population using a mobile phone went from 4 million to more than 750 million. In
an ambitious exploration of the changes wrought by this rapid growth, the anthropologists Robin
Jeffrey and Assa Doron described mobile phones as ‘the most disruptive device to hit humanity
since shoes,’19
because of the way they materially changed both everyday life and explicitly
political undertakings. In the case of the latter, Jeffrey and Doron credit the surprising electoral
victory of a previously marginalized political party with its ability to use new mobile phone
networks. ‘The mobile or cell phone has radically changed the potential for political organization
in India… because of India’s unique structures of privilege and social discrimination and the way
in which cheap cell phones can subvert such structures. Mass dissemination of mobile phones
has created possibilities that previously did not exist.’20
In another work on India, scholar Arvind Rajagopal drew similar conclusions about the
development of Hindu nationalism, which he saw as project undertaken in light of new
possibilities created by growth in print media and audio-visual technology.21
Rajagopal’s
argument is not of cause and effect (‘television caused Hindu nationalism’), but that media re-
shaped the context in which nationalism was being enacted.22
In Myanmar, then, it can be
similarly said that political contests and conflicts are unfolding in a context that is being re-
shaped by the full corpus of technologies that will arrive along with telecommunications
networks, including mobile phones, the Internet, and social media. As during the time of
Rajagopal’s research, narratives about Myanmar’s present and future are actively being enacted.
The technological environment is not the only aspect of life for which clear ‘before’ and ‘after’
moments can be drawn. The state and society in Myanmar are in the midst of profound political
conflicts, while also encountering contemporary globalization and the host of felt vulnerabilities
18
Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction: Authority, Political Machines, and Technology’s
History,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed.
Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 1, 11.
19
Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, The Great Indian Phone Book: How Cheap Mobile Phones Change Business,
Politics and Daily Life (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), 2.
20
Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, “Mobile-izing: Democracy, Organization and India’s First ‘Mass Mobile Phone’
Elections,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 01 (2012): 64.
21
Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272.
22
Ibid., 1.

7. Matt Schissler
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that come with this.23
Myanmar is thus in a moment when narratives about the country’s past,
present and future are open and being contested and remade as never before.
One important narrative is of the threats and antagonisms that Buddhist and Muslim
communities face from each other. The efforts of organized political forces are necessary for
such narratives to develop, but they are never enough alone. Public rhetoric, journal articles,
propaganda, these things must also be reinforced through what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘little
stories,’ those everyday experiences and conversations that repeat and illustrate the larger scripts
of fear and antagonism.24
How, then, will new technologies and media interact with the
development of these narratives? As people participate in the development of narratives of fear
and antagonism, how will this be made different in light of new technologies? Technologies
matter, as Hecht said, and just as with the television and mobile phone in India, new things will
become possible, and more likely: people in Myanmar will encounter new ideas and information
in new ways, more often, and more visually. They will be able to share and repeat this, and it
will all be faster than ever before.
The analysis from the US is valuable, then, not because it shows that social media
predetermines Myanmar’s future but because it highlights considerations for understanding, and
acting on, the relationship between technologies and politics. This chapter will close by
highlighting three such considerations for Myanmar.
Firstly, as increasing linkages are being drawn between social media and conflict in
Myanmar, this is also being accompanied by calls for the Myanmar government and private
companies such as Facebook to more strictly regulate discourses such as ‘hate speech.’ Such a
response can appear warranted, particularly when individual Facebook posts are assigned blame
for ‘sparking’ riots as in Mandalay during July. The above analysis, however, helps to indicate
the radical insufficiency of such an approach. Sunstein and Pariser’s concerns are with the
negative effects of epistemic seclusion, which they see as created by the technology. This is not
just an issue of ‘hate speech.’ Pieces of information shared on Facebook and other platforms,
including private and state-controlled media, may be unobjectionable in isolation but problematic
in aggregate. Myanmar Buddhist Facebook users may see videos of violence committed by
Muslims, and no corollary videos of violence against Muslims. They will feel no less the victim
under threat than Muslim users inundated with similar information and imagery; and neither side
will accept that the other side may be suffering, too. When discourses are obviously virulent and
hateful they are more easily censored. But they are not always so easy to identify. Repeated
selective sharing of stories about crimes by one side and not the other is not necessarily hate
speech that can be censored, but it may nonetheless serve to confirm beliefs about Islam as
inherently violent, even if this is never stated. The only way to censor such discourse would be
with extremely broad restrictions on speech. Even in countries with extremely developed judicial
systems, such a legal exercise is difficult to undertake without losing freedom of speech; it would
be exceptionally difficult for Myanmar.
Secondly, while the American example helps indicate that censorship of objectionable
discourses such as ‘hate speech’ is insufficient, it also complicates the idea that the opposite
23
On the relationship between feelings of vulnerability associated with globalization and violence against
minorities, see Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press Books, 2006).
24
Ibid., 91.

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presents a solution. Here again the wide gap between the US and Myanmar context makes the
comparison instructive: American style protections for freedom of expression are among the
strongest in the world. It is a rich media environment, literally and figuratively, where people
have widespread access to information and communications technologies. Yet Sunstein and
Pariser are still concerned that circulation of information in this environment is promoting
divisions and extremism. The American example is thus a good lesson that the Internet and
social media will not automatically lead to free and open exchange of ideas or promote harmony
and mutual understanding.
Finally, while the idea of the ‘echo chamber’ can at times shade into technological
determinism, it is a useful metaphor for conceptualizing strategies for promoting peace and
reducing conflict. The ‘echo chamber’ conjures an image of a physical structure, prompting one
to ask: how are its walls constructed? Answer: its walls are constructed by the interwoven mesh
of those sources for information and ideas that people rely upon. In the US, Sunstein focused on
walls constructed by those new forms of media available on the Internet, but even with the
addition of offline sources the metaphor is still valuable. In Myanmar, if these walls are
recognized, than this points towards a next step: deconstruct them. But the American example
also indicates that simply making alternative information available is not be enough if it never
makes it inside the chamber.
At the same time, the idea of an ‘echo chamber’ can also be a potential source of power,
because it highlights the way that messages can become additionally persuasive as they
reverberate and bounce off its walls. Sunstein closes Republic.Com, for example, by noting that
this was an important part of anti-slavery and civil rights social movements.25
Seclusion can
make people feel more comfortable to speak, particularly if they are expressing views that do not
align with dominant viewpoints. This can be dangerous when it promotes extremism, but it can
be useful in a context in which the dominant viewpoint is not in favour of peace and harmony. If
repeating messages within secluded groups can help strengthen them, even where they differ
from the majority, then the goal becomes drawing more people in. In this sense then the chamber
is not to be shattered but expanded, on the hope that peace can lie within.
25
Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2009), 214.